This commit switches from the previous behavior of compiling the whole
program at once, to compiling every package in parallel and linking the
LLVM bitcode files together for further whole-program optimization.
This is a small performance win, but it has several advantages in the
future:
- There are many more things that can be done per package in parallel,
avoiding the bottleneck at the end of the compiler phase. This
should speed up the compiler futher.
- This change is a necessary step towards a non-LTO build mode for
fast incremental builds that only rebuild the changed package, when
compiler speed is more important than binary size.
- This change refactors the compiler in such a way that it will be
easier to inspect the IR for one package only. Inspecting this IR
will be very helpful for compiler developers.
Moving settings to a separate config struct has two benefits:
- It decouples the compiler a bit from other packages, most
importantly the compileopts package. Decoupling is generally a good
thing.
- Perhaps more importantly, it precisely specifies which settings are
used while compiling and affect the resulting LLVM module. This will
be necessary for caching the LLVM module.
While it would have been possible to cache without this refactor, it
would have been very easy to miss a setting and thus let the
compiler work with invalid/stale data.
This commit finally introduces unit tests for the compiler, to check
whether input Go code is converted to the expected output IR.
To make this necessary, a few refactors were needed. Hopefully these
refactors (to compile a program package by package instead of all at
once) will eventually become standard, so that packages can all be
compiled separate from each other and be cached between compiles.